Release F: Supplemental A1 Simulator Behavior

Kafka-based request-response abstraction:

The O-RAN SC Kafka Message Dispatcher is a specific implementation of an A1 Simulator, which redirects A1 Policy operations to a Kafka message topic, to be consumed by an external function.

A1 Policy is redirected as Kafka messages to a configured Kafka Topic to an external receiver, then responses from the external receiver are collected from another configured Kafka Topic. This provides a Kafka-based request-response abstraction for adding supplemental simulator behavior for particular A1 Policy Types. After a request message is sent, a response message will be expected within some configurable timeout interval (default: 30 sec). The topics to be used for particular A1 Policy Types are configured using a JSON like:

{
  "STD_1": {
    "request_topic": "kafkatopicreq1",
    "response_topic": "kafkatopicres1"
  },
  "STD_2": {
    "request_topic": "kafkatopicreq2",
    "response_topic": "kafkatopicres2"
  }
}

Note: The Kafka message dispatcher functionality is only available for ‘STD_2.0.0’ version A1 simulators.